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CRONES
Excerpt from Secret History
of the Witches, copyright 2000 Max Dashu
Celtic traditions contained a rich lode of myths about
a divine Old Woman. In Gaelic (both Irish and Scottish)she is called the
Cailleach (from caille, mantle or veil, thus veiled one.) [The Q-Celtic
word cailleach is related to the Latin pallium, which
survived as the name for a priestly stole. MacKenzie thinks cailleach
originally signified a nun, but the ancient traditions predate christianity.
137] This is not a veil of modesty—the cailleachan are wild—but
of mystery.
[Graphic: Irish cailleach, a shiela-na-gig of the oldest
type. Originally freestanding, the stone was later built into the walls
of Fethard Abbey.
The Cailleach has universal qualities; she is not
a goddess of fertility or death or any one thing, but a deity who is both
transcendent and immanent. She is connected with rivers, lakes, wells,
marshes, the sea and storms; with rocks, mountains, boulders, megalithic
temples and standing stones; and with cattle, swine, goats, sheep, wolves,
bird, fish, trees, and plants. Scots call her the Old Wife of Thunder.
[MacKenzie]
The Cailleach sometimes assumes the shape of gulls, eagles, herons, and
cormorants. [MacKenzie] She rambles the hills followed by troops of deer
and wild pigs, and leaps from hilltop to hilltop. She created mountains
and lakes, she built the archaic cairns and megaliths. Rees calls her
“the most tremendous figure in Gaelic myth today.”
As “daughter of the little sun,” the Cailleach is an elemental
power of winter, the cold, wind, and tempests. She comes into power as
the days shorten and the sun courses low in the skies. She carries a slachdan
(wand of power) with which she shapes the land and controls the weather.
In the Skye folk-tale “Finlay the Changeling” she strikes
the ground with it, making the earth harden with frost. Wherever the Cailleach
throws her slachdan nothing grows. [MacKenzie, 140-1]
The last spurt of harsh winter weather is called A' Chailleach. Then comes
Latha na Caillich, which in the old calendar fell on March 25, the equinox,
and this is when the hag was “overthrown”—til the next
equinox. [That used to be new years day, but now is called Lady Day. Mackenzie,
143] In early spring the Cailleach hurls her slachdan into the root of
the holly and gorse, plants symbolic of winter and sacred to her. During
the “big sun”—the light half of the year—she metamorphoses
into a gray boulder that exudes moisture.
Scots used to say that the Cailleach ushers in winter by washing her big
plaid in the whirlpool of Corryvreckan (Coire Bhreacain: Cauldron of the
Plaid). As the knowledgeable Mrs. Grant explained to a folklorist:
Before the washing the roar of a coming tempest
is heard by people on the coast for a distance of 20 miles, and for a
period of three days before the cauldron boils. When the washing is over
the plaid of old Scotland is virgin white. [MacKenzie, 141-2]
People observed and watched for definite meterological changes that signalled
the coming of the Cailleach, who brought snowfall over the heather-dyed
hills and fields. Various accounts show Cailleach Beura and her helpers
riding on wolves and wild pigs (like Norse and Russian witches) especially
in February storms. [MacKenzie, 165]
Ireland and Scotland are covered with natural shrines associated with
the Cailleach. The stormiest headlands on the coast of Mull used to be
called Cailleach point. The Old Goddess sat on its rocks, looking out
to sea. A nearby cave was called the milking-place of the Cailleach's
goats and sheep. Likewise the rocks at Lora Falls were called steppingstones
of the Cailleach and her goats. [MacKenzie, 151]
The Muilearteach was an ocean Cailleach armed with “two slender
spears of battle.” Upon her head the Muilearteach had “gnarled
brushwood, like the clawed old wood of aspen root.” [Ross, 233]
Her face was blue-black of the lustre of coal
And her bone-tufted tooth was like red rust.
In her head was one pool-like eye,
Swifter than a star in a winter sky. [MacKenzie, ScFL2, 159]
Another blue-faced crone was Black Annis, who lived in a cave in Leicestershire.
Even the Puritan poet Milton remembered a “blew, meager hag,”
but in his time she had become heavily demonized. [Briggs, 24, 58]
THE CAILLEACH BHÉARA
The great Old Goddess of Ireland was the Cailleach Bhéara,
or Hag of Béare in Munster. She “existed from the long eternity
of the world.” [cite] A woman of Tiree once asked the Cailleach
how old she was. She replied that she remembered when the Skerryvore rocks
were fields where barley was farmed and when the lakes were little wells.
[MacKenzie, 162-3] Her great age was a sign of power, truly venerable,
and proverbial: “as old as the Cailleach Bhéarra.”
This cailleach was named Boí, “Cow,” a title she shared
with Bóind and other ancient Irish goddesses. She was also called
Sentainne, “Old Woman.” The Irish said that “she passed
into seven periods of youth, so that every husband used to pass to death
from her of old age, so that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren
were peoples and races.” [O Hogain, 67]
[Graphic: The Crone as ancestor, with magical holes bored around her womb
and vulva, as well as openings for horns on her head. Shiela-na-gig of
Seir Kieran, Offaly.]
The Corca Loighdhe sept claimed Boí as their ancestor, and the
Corca Dhuibhne said that she had been their foster mother. The ancestor
of this clan, the “people of Duibhne,” was Dovinia, a goddess
whose name appears in several ogham inscriptions in west Munster. [O Hogain,
67, 119] The Book of Lecan says “... it was bequeathed
[to the Corco Dhuibhne] that they shall never be without some wonderful
Cailleach among them.” [Rees?]
Another writer says that the Cailleach raised fifty foster children. In
a story recorded around 1000, one of these children was a child of incest
who narrowly escaped being burned for it. A druid saved him and gave him
to his wife Boí. They raised him, bathing him in the sea every
morning on the back of a white, red-eared cow. [O Hogain, 119] This would
be Buí’s renowned fortune-bringing cow. [Wood-Martin, 214,
who calls her “the celebrated witch Vera”]
The Beare peninsula in west Cork belonged to this Old Woman, and the island
Inis Boí at its end was named after her. A sea rock was pointed
out as the Tarbh Conraidh, the cailleach's great bull. His bellow impregnated
the cows who heard it. But once he went swimming after a cow, and the
Cailleach struck him with her slachdan, turning him to stone.
The Cailleach's slachdan relates to staffs used by Celtic shamans. The
Fé was made of aspen wood, sometimes with Ogham characters cut
on it, and had power both in healing and cursing. It was used to strike
what was detested. This striking could also banish ills. Cormac's Glossary
calls it a magic wand. Priests considered it pagan and forbade people
to bury it with the dead in christian cemeteries. A manuscript of 1509
recommended cutting the name of a man made impotent through magic on the
wand in Ogham runes and striking him with it. [Wood-Martin, 305]
While the cailleach's slachdan resembles the Fé and magic wands
of the Celts and Norse, it also holds cosmological significance as the
power of cold, darkness and winter. It symbolizes the active force of
the Old Goddess in Celtic culture. When she hurls it she creates rocks
in Ireland and rearranges the coast of Scotland. When the light half of
the year begins, she hurls her slachdan to the base of the (evergreen)
holly or gorse, storing her power of the cold and dark there until the
advent of winter.
[graphic: shiela w/ slachdan, Irish abbey]
The Cailleach Bhéarra was credited with extremely sharp sight,
being able to discern from a distance of twenty miles. It is said that
she never carried mud on her feet from one place to another, and never
threw out dirty water before bringing in clean. [O Hogain, 67-8] This
last was a faery taboo widely observed across Ireland.
People in Connaught connected the Cailleach with the sowing and harvesting
of grain. She taught the Irish how to thresh: using a holly-stick flail,
a hazel-wood striker, and threshing sheaves on a clean floor, one at a
time. They followed her custom of sowing in late winter—”the
oats of February”—and harvesting green corn before the autumn
storms came. In many Gaelic-speaking areas the first or last sheaf harvested
was called the Cailleach, and treated with ceremony. [O Hogain, 68]
[Graphic: Hag's Chair, Loughcrew megaliths, Ireland]
The Hag's Chair faces north inside one of the great cairns atop the Loughcrew
hills. This was a six-foot high stone seat engraved with a vulva-gate,
concentric circles, and other signs, with a lot of quartz scattered around
it. Legend says that the Cailleach Bhéarra came from the north
to perform a magical act that would give her great power. She filled her
apron with stones, dropping a cairn on Carnbane, then jumped a mile to
Slieve-na-cally (Hag's Mountain) to drop another, then on to the next
hill, where she let another fall. On her fourth and final leap she slipped
and fell to her death. [W-M, 251-3]
Countless Irish myths tell how the Cailleach constructed huge mounds,
megaliths, and towers in a single night. Some of them are known by names
like “one-night's-work.” [Wood-Martin, 134] Scottish myths
often cast the Cailleach as a shaper of the landscape. She carried earth
and stones on her back to make the hills of Ross-shire. Sometimes the
basket or its strap broke, spilling the contents out to form mounts like
Ben Vaichaird and rock piles like Carn na Caillich. Faeries called glaistigean
are credited with similar land-building feats. [MacKenzie, 164, 144]
The Cailleach created the Hag's Furrow while ploughing. She turned up
huge piles of stones while ploughing on mount Schiehallion, the Caledonian
faery hill. (Its Gaelic name, Sídh Chaillean, means “Crone's
Mound.” Many other places are named Beinne na Cailleach (her mount)
and Sgríob na Cailleach (her writing). Folklore says that the Crone
turned into a boulder atop Beinn na Callich, where a prehistoric cairn
also stands. [MacKenzie, 144]
In Altagore, county Antrim, stood a stone called the Shanven, “old
woman.” People considered it sacred, leaving oatcakes and butter
offerings there. One story says that a mason ignorant of the stone's power
moved it for use as a gate-post. The next morning it had returned to its
old place. [Wood-Martin, 224-5] The Shanven story resembles French tales
of Black Virgins' removal and miraculous return to their mountain sanctuaries.
Irish folk memory also refers to the medieval practice of taking shiela-na-gigs
away from wells and fields to incorporate them into doorways and walls
of churches, monasteries, and castles.
In Armagh the Cailleach Bhéarra was said to live in a deep chamber
under a hilltop megalith near Slieve Gullion. People visited this spot
on Blaeberry Sunday, a survival of Lughnasadh. [Anne Ross, “The
Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts,” 156] [insert on megalithic trads
of Loughcrew, Slieve-na-cailleach] Slieve gullion in Armagh is called
Calliagh Birra's House, and the megalithic site Carrownamaddoo 2 is also
called Calliagh A Vera's House. In many places standing stones are said
to be people and animals she transformed. [O Hogain, 68]
Near Antrim is a búllan (rock basin) known as the Witch's Stone.
When the Cailleach finished building the Round Tower, she leaped off the
top and landed on this stone, leaving marks from her elbow and her knee.
This stone used to lie near a stream. Much later, a wall was built, cutting
the stone off from the water. [Wood-Martin, 247]
Another Irish story says that the Cailleach was so tall that she was able
to wade in all Ireland's lakes and rivers, but that she drowned while
crossing the deepest loch in Sligo, the Lake of Two Geese. This lake is
rumored to have an underground outlet and a monster that guarded treasure
in its depths. Folk legends speak of how an attempt to dig out the treasure
was foiled by the “good people.” Nearby, in the mountains
above Kilross, stands a stone formation the peasants call the house of
the Cailleach. [Wood-Martin, 214-6, 131]
[Shiela-na-gig of Celtic make on the Oseberg cauldron, Norway]
As she first enters written record around 1000, this dynamic figure has
been rendered nearly unrecognizable in a stunning example of patriarchal
revisionism. The untamed cailleach who tossed boulders and leaped hilltops,
roaming through the mountains with forest animals or, witch-like, taking
their shape, is now pictured an unhappy, powerless nun:
I am Buí, the Old Woman of Beare
I used to wear a smock that was ever-renewed
Today it has befallen me, by my low estate,
That I could not have even a cast-off smock to wear.
This poem about the Cailleach Bhéarra was written around the 11th
century and preserved in the Otia Merseiana collection. [according to
Professor Kuno Meyer, who dealt with 2 mss dating to 1500-1600s in Trinity
College Library, Dublin. Wood-Martin, 217] The manuscript betrays priestly
influences, recasting the Cailleach as the mother of St Fintan or the
wife of an 8th century poet, in the familiar pattern of stripping down
ancient myths and reinterpretating them according to patriarchal norms.
Under these terms, female might of the magnitude expressed in folklore
is unthinkable.
Lone is Femen: vacant, bare
Stands in Bregon Ronan's chair.
And the slow tooth of the sky
Frets the stones where my dead lie. [Ibid, 218]
The poem is about death, winter, decay. In this there is some congruence
with strands of folk culture linking the Cailleach to winter and the season
of little sun. But the poem is brimming over with female bitterness and
intense loss. Age is no longer venerable and powerful, rather it is seen
as contemptible and weak. Her beauty gone, the Cailleach sits at the fringes
of society, disregarded, in want. At last she sings her death song: “My
life ebbs from me like the sea / Old age has made me yellow.” [Ibid,
216]
Ebb, flood, and ebb: I know
Well the ebb, and well the flow.
And the second ebb, all three,
Have they not come home to me? [Ibid, 219]
This Buí of Beare laments her poverty and low status, the loss
of the company of chiefs and warriors. “Only women folk I hate”—because
of their beauty and the pleasures offered them. The old woman remembers
the men she loved, and how she raced with them on the fields. King Diarmaid
no longer comes to her; he is rowing across the river of the dead. Buí
drank mead with kings, but now sits with “shrivelled hags”
swillling the whey-water of poverty. She is made to follow the routines
of a nun, against her will: “And as upon God I call/ Turn my blood
to angry gall.” [Wood-Martin, 218]
While this poem reflects the bitter lot of old women in patriarchal society,
it takes Buí far from her origins as the Cailleach of the peasantry:
a being of immense antiquity who is able to renew her vitality in wells
of virtue and who outlasts generations of offspring, whose age is not
shameful but revered, and who joyously heaves boulders and shapes the
earth.
THE SCOTTISH CAILLEACHAN
In spite of all the efforts of the priests and learned
men, the lowly and powerful current of folklore carried the outlawed mythosophy
of the Cailleach into modern times. She survived in Ireland as well as
Scotland, where the Irish Scota settled, pollinating tales of “great
supernatural hags haunting mountain passes or driving their deer over
the hills and conferring benefits and evils on humanity as they saw fit.”
[Ross, 233]
Mountain springs were sanctuaries of the Scottish Cailleach. She was said
to visit them to renew her strength, or to perform rites bringing on passage
of the seasons. One Scottish tradition said that the Cailleach came in
the dead of night to the Well of Youth (near Loch Ba of Mull) and drank
“before bird tasted water or dog was heard to bark.” Her incredible
longevity came from the water of life. Over the centuries, said the people,
she had borne over five hundred children. In one version of this story,
a dog barked before the Cailleach had bent to the water, and she crumbled
into dust. [MacKenzie, 162-3]
A much-revered fountain in Banffshire was named Taber Cailleach, Well
of the Old Woman. People made pilgrimages and offerings there. Religious
trips to springs were as common in Scotland as in Spain, France, or Germany.
Scots walked nine times around the Well of Virtues after drinking from
its waters, and then circumambulated the menhirs standing beside the well.
[MacKenzie]
The Scots often spoke of beur cailleachan in the plural, as powerful
beings living in lochs and among rushes. A certain tall lakeside reed
was called “the distaff of the Bera wives.” Another water
plant like flag was called their “staff.” [MacK, 137] A Gaelic
song mentions the three cailleachan of the Scottish Hebrides. [MacK, 153]
The Scottish cailleach's cow was said to give great amounts of milk. In
Benderloch “circular green hollows are referred to as 'Cailleach
Bheur's cheese-vats.' ” A rock shelter in Ardnamurchan is called
the Caillich's Byre, and it was said that she kept her cattle there. [MacKenzie,
151] Like all faery cattle they were inviolate. An Irish legend says that
once the cailleach's neighbors stole her magical cow and began driving
her toward their farm. The crone gave chase, caught them and struck all
three with her slachdan, turning them to stone. The largest of these rocks
is called Clochtogla, the lifted stone. [Wood-Martin, 214]
The Cailleach Bhéara was known all over Scotland as the wilderness
spirit and protector of wild animals. The highest peak in Scotland, Ben
Nevis, was sacred to the Cailleach. From it she takes her name of Nicniven.
(The Gaelic prefix Ní- or Nic means “daughter of.”)
The Cailleach took her herds of deer to Glen Nevis, singing croons as
she milked them. Hunters who could not find deer blamed her for protecting
them. [MacKenzie, 152]
The Scots had many songs known as faery croons, sung by cailleachs or
other supernatural women associated with animist sanctuaries. The old
glaistig of Ben Breck in Lochaber sang a croon to her does as she drove
them up the mountainside. It has an incantatory quality, invoking the
Hag of Ben Breck herself with a hailing cry:
Cailleach Beinne Bric, horó!
Bric horó! Bric horó!
Cailleach Beinne Bric, horó!
Hag of the fountain high!
I ne'er would let my troop of deer,
Troop of deer, troop of deer;
I ne'er would let my troop of deer,
A-gathering shellfish to the tide.
Better liked they cooling cress,
Cooling cress, cooling cress;
Better liked they cooling cress,
That grows beside the fountain high. [cite]
In another version of this croon, the Cailleach proclaims that she is
an old woman who ranges the mountains and glens, and adds, “I never
set fetter on black or red cow in the herd.... I am the carlin [old woman]
who is light/ Alone on the spur of the cairns.” [Carmichael, 494]
The great Cailleach of Clibhrich used witchcraft to keep the hunters away
from her deer. Early one morning a man named William watched her milking
her does at the door of her hut. One of them ate some blue yarn she had
hanging on a nail in her house, so she took off her protection, predicting
that it would be shot. And so it happened. [MacK, 152-3]
Mala Liatha (“Grey Eyebrows”) was the protector of wild animals,
including the wild boar hunted by Diarmaid. She taunted the warrior and
interfered with his hunting. He grabbed her by the foot and threw her
over a cliff. Then he succeeded in killing the boar, but had not triumphed
after all. A venomous bristle on its slaughtered body pierced his foot
and was the death of him. [MacK, 148-9]
A strange old woman called the Doonie once saved a boy who fell off a
cliff and was hanging onto a hazel-bush. She appeared below him, telling
him to jump into her apron. He fell through it into the river, but she
grabbed his neck and pulled him out. She warned him never again to hunt
the rock-doves, “Or maybe the Doonie'll no be here tae kep ye.”
[Briggs, 106]
Many legends tell of the Cailleach's fierce struggles with hunters. She
tries to get the hunter to bind his dogs with one of her hairs, then grows
large and attacks him. “Long have you been the devoted enemy of
my persecuted sisterhood.” [MacKenzie, 132]
When a pack of dogs attacked the Gyre Carline, she turned into a pig and
ran away. This crone goddess of lowland Scotland carried an iron club.
One old poem says the Gyre Carline lived on men's flesh, upholding the
demonied witch-stereotype. But Sir Walter Scott called her the “mother
witch of the Scottish peasantry.” [MacKenzie c 150]
HAGS VERSUS HEROES
Powerful old women's opposition to military heroes appears
throughout the tales and sagas of barbarian Europe, and survives in modern
peasant folklore. The hags in these stories have the power of shapeshifting,
transforming themselves into wild animals or stunningly beautiful maidens.
Their power reaches to the sun, moves rocks and earth and wind.
The Scottish Muilearteach, who raised winds and storms, came in the form
of a hag to Scottish heroes, begging to be allowed near the fire. As she
warmed herself, she grew large and aggressive. [Briggs, 304] The same
story is told of the glaistig, protector of the deer, who comes
to a highland cabin where hunters are gathered. She hunkers down by the
fire and begins to swell in size. The hag demands snuff from a hunter,
and if he is not canny enough to offer it to her on the point of his dirk,
she jumps him and begins to choke him.
The hunting dogs spring at her, and she tells the hunter to keep them
back. She pulls a gray hair from her head to tie them up, but the wise
hunter will use his garter instead. The glaistig goes after him the minute
the hounds are tied, saying “Tighten hair.” But the hunter
says “Loosen garter.” With the dogs after her, the glaistig
backs out the door. They pursue her like a deer until suddenly she turns
and fights. The hounds come back mangled and plucked clean of hair. Without
these animals and their own cunning the hunters do not fare well in combat
with the glaisteag.
The Tale of the Strath Dearn Hunter shows the influence of the witch hunts.
The supernatural glaistig becomes a human witch. After appearing first
as a hen, then as a hag, she ends up fighting the dogs. They return to
the hunter in very poor shape. He returns home to find his wife has gone
off to attend a neighbor woman who seemed to be in terrible pain. The
hunter is suspicious, goes to the house and tears the covers off her.
Her breasts have been torn off by hounds' teeth. The hunter denounces
the woman as a witch and kills her with his sword. [Craigie?]
The Russian skazki show Baba Yaga or the amazon Nastasya defeating the
bogatyrs, male heroes of phenomenal strength. Hags battle or enchant Find
and other warriors in Irish and Welsh epics. A hag fought the war-hero
Cu Chullain, attempting to bind him magically with one of her hairs.
The fateful Morrigan confronted CuChullain in the form of a red-eyebrowed
woman wearing a long crimson mantle. She then changed herself into a crow.
“A dangerous enchanted woman you are,” said CuChulainn. His
ultimate doom was set in motion when three old women on the road shamed
him into breaking his geis against eating dog meat. Their words to him
could be said to sum up the conflict between hags and warriors, peasants
and aristocrats: “Unseemly are the great who endure not the little
and poor.” [Anne Ross, “The Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts,”
157]
As in so many of these stories, CuChullain is made out the hero, and the
elders' reproach is presented as an unjust manipulation of him, completely
isolated from the cultural context of the grandmothers. But it represents
a survival of the politically submerged concerns of women elders: the
true nature of war, and the arrogance of aristocratic heroes in the eyes
of the common people.
In the end, the fateful raven goddess prevailed against the renowned warrior.
Appearing in the shape of the maiden Niam, she tricked CuChullain into
singlehanded combat with an advancing army. Faring to Emain, he saw Babd's
daughter washing blood at the ford, a foretold omen of his death. The
Morrigan broke his chariot, and the Grey Horse of Macha reproached him.
When he fell, the Morrigan swept down from a great height to utter three
triumphant cries over him. [Markale, 113, 214; Races 155-6]
In many Irish stories the crone goddess, often under the
name of the Badb (bao, or raven), ordains or foreshadows the warrior's
death. She is seen washing at the ford, and the clothing belongs to one
about to die in battle. [Ross, Hag, 158] An Irish tale, The Enchanted
Cave of Keshcorran, shows her as a threefold spinner of fate. When Finn
MacCumhal angered the Tuatha Dé by hunting on their lands, three
women set out to work vengeance on him.
The women sought the entrance of the cave that
was in the mound, and there sat by each other. Upon three crooked and
wry sticks of holly they hung many heathenish bewitched hasps of yarn,
which they began to reel off lefthandwise in front of the cave. [Ross,
160]
In this way they drained vigor from Finn and Conan, who perceived them
as wild-haired hags with fangs and claws and furry legs. [Anne Ross, “The
Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts,” 160; also Rees] Although epic singers
made Finn MacCumhall into a national hero, his Fianna historically oppressed
the people of Leinster. Their exactions “became so heavy that king
and people rose against them and routed them at Cnucha...” [M.A.R.,
160]
A similar dynamic counterposing a powerful hag goddess against the brute
force of war-heroes is played out in the Finnish Kalevala, “Land
of Heroes.” Its main action centers around warriors' attempts to
seize the daughters of the old spinner Louhi. She fights to protect her
daughters, whose mates must be chosen by merit, not force. Although she
retains divine powers, Louhi is demonized as the storyteller sides with
the male heroes.
The old woman declares that whoever is able to forge the magical Sampo
will be allowed to marry her daughter. One of the suitors hires a smith
who performs the feat. When this suitor presents Louhi with the Sampo
he has purchased, she passes him over and, true to her word, marries the
maiden to the smith who forged the Sampo. The warrior Ilmarinen, failing
to get Louhi's consent to marry another daughter, abducts her. The rejected
suitors gang up on Louhi and capture the Sampo, but as they flee in a
boat, the old woman calls up a terrible storm, wrecking Vainamoinen's
magical zither and scattering the Sampo. When the warriors regather its
parts, Louhi shuts the sun and moon up in a cave, but in the end she is
killed.
[Graphic: Louhi attacks thieves of the Sampo. Kallen-Gallela, 1896]
Like Demeter and Amaterasu, Louhi has the power to shut off life force
when female sovereignty is outraged. Though the epic portrays her as evil,
she retains divine qualities. She is called the Lady of Pohjala, the northern
land of the dead. There are hints that she is the rightful guardian of
the Sampo. When she is killed, the Sampo withdraws to a faraway island
in the mists “where they eat not and they fight not, whither swordsmen
never wander.” [Walker, Crone, 105] Everything having to do with
war is incompatible with the sacred nature of the Sampo.
The Finns said that first the Sampo ground out prosperity and happiness,
then salt. Now it grinds sand and stone, “generating a vast whirlpool
at the bottom of the sea.” Its multicolored lid was the vault of
heaven, its central post the world Tree. [Laurie, E.R.]
Scandanavians, like the Celts, had legends about women who flung great
boulders across the land and were responsible for the placement of rocks
and other geographic features. These beings were variously called
tröllkonur (troll women) and giantesses, names often interchangeable
with “witch” in folkore. [Grimm, 1041] Often the trollkonur
can be recognized as immanent divinities of the land. Givinarhol, the
giantess' cave, belonged to an old woman who left her footprints in the
rock near the lake. She ground gold in a quern. [Craigie] In feudal times,
these beings are described as falling into bondage.
About 2000 years ago, when Frothi of the Skjoldings was king, he bought
the bondmaids Fenja and Menja, of jötun (giant) kindred.
The might of jötun women was legendary; they could lift huge boulders
and hurl them long distances. The king brought them before two magical
millstones, so huge that no man was capable of grinding them, but which
had a power of grinding out whatever they were told. Frothi ordered his
thralls to grind out gold for him. So Fenja and Menja labored at the stones,
and the greedy king gave them small rest—no longer than the cuckoo
remained silent. As they ground, the magical women chanted of their great
strength, how they tossed boulders as children, and how they gave battle
in Sweden.
Ultimately, the king's attempt to harness natural powers out of greed
for gold ultimately fails, as “the foreknowing pair” chant
down their master. They prophesy his fall, enemies burning his hall, their
song mounting as they grind harder and faster, rocking the quern, overturning
it, splitting the its stone with their momentum. “Ground have we,
Frothi, now fain would cease; we have toiled enough at turning the mill.”
[Grottasongr, Hollander 158; Helgakvitha H. II reworks
the tale of the mighty bondswomen with Helgi in drag, disguised as a woman
to avoid capture by his enemies. He fools them into thinking he is a captured
valkyrie.]
Other stories compare the giantesses with ordinary women who saw their
loved ones killed. One jötun woman avenged her husband by hurling
a battle-ax across the bay, driving it into his killer's forehead. [MacK]
In a saga episode of The Flyting of Atli, the giantess Hrimgerth
confronted Atli, a lieutenant of the man who killed her father. Atli told
her that their fleet was protected with iron “so that no witches
may work us ill.” [Hollander, 173]
The two antagonists duelled with poetry (flyting was a ritual of insults).
Atli bragged that he was hateful “to hags,” having often done
night-riders to death, and wished Hrimgerth nine leagues under the ground.
Then he accused her of holding up Helgi's ships by witchcraft. Hrimgerth
retorted that it was her mother who did that; she herself was working
on drowning part of the fleet.
Hrimgerth taunted Atli, calling him a gelding with the whinny of an uncastrated
stallion but with his heart in the hind end. She dared her opponent to
step on land “in reach of my claws,” but he demurred on the
excuse of his duty to Helgi. Then the jötun witch called out Helgi,
her father's killer. Only with the help of Helgi's valkyrie lover was
Hrimgerth prevented from slaying all his men. As the sun rose, the giant
woman turned to stone in the legendary manner of trolls and dwarves. [Hollander,
173, Helgakvitha. Cf Alvismal, in which Thor questions
the “allwise” dwarf, detaining him until dawn, when he turns
to stone.]
Flesh-and-blood witches were believed to be on good terms with these elvish
divinities. A 10th-century charm in Bald’s Leechbook purports to
protect against female sorcery and the elves:
Against each evil witch [leodrune, literally
mystery-singer] and against elvish fascination, write this writing for
him, these Greek letters... [I. 44, mid-10th c. MS, in Meaney p 22]
This priestly spell instructs a man to write a Greek magical formula in
silence, to be worn on his left breast as an amulet. In a similar vein,
the Old Saxon sowing charm that begins, “Erce, Erce, Eorthan Mother”
has survived only in its clerical revisionist version. The plougher invokes
the Lord to guard his field against “witchcrafts sown throughout
the land” and prays “that no witch be eloquent enough nor
any man powerful enough to pervert the words thus pronounced.” [Berger
65]
Conflicts between divine hags and warriors model the antagonism of old
wisewomen to warlords in real life. Not surprisingly, warlords' contempt
for witches was accompanied by a strong dose of fear. Anglo-Saxon men
believed that witches and elves could make them sick or weak, even kill
them. They were afraid of hags or hedge-riders (hagtessen) travelling
by night, and of spirit warrior-women called walcygean, the Saxon
equivalent of valkyries. In 1022 Wulfstan, archbishop of York, wrote,
“Here in England there are witches and walcygean.”
[Graphic: Old woman attempting to dissuade a warrior from violence. Illustration
of Kalevala by Gallen-Kallela.]
Witches represented an impressive obstacle to conquest in the minds of
early medival warriors. It is written that before the Norman invasion
of England, Gyrth had a dream that a great witch stood on the island,
opposing the king's fleet with a fork and a trough. Tord dreamed that
“before the army of the people of the country was a riding a huge
witch-wife upon a wolf,” and she tossed the invading soldiers into
its mouth. [Branston, 101]
An 11th century English spell “to cure a stitch in the side”
interprets the pains as haegtessen geweorc, the work of a hag-witch
who inflicts magical wounds. It also draws on the archaic idea of the
valkyries as fateful spirits:
Loud were the mighty women when they rode over
the hill
Loud were the mighty women when they rode over the land...
I stood under a shield while the mighty women
Prepared their strength and sent screaming spears...
[see Grimm 1244, Storms, 50 others]
Aristocratic warriors demonized the witch because she resisted their brute
force with spiritual power. At severe physical and political disadvantage
to the warlord, the female serf turned to folk religion for protection
against feudal violence, including institutionalized rape.
Though the oppression of women and peasants was on the rise, old beliefs
in the witch's power endured. A heavily armed man might hesitate to harm
or offend an old woman reputed for her Cræft. The hagtessen avenged
wrongs committed against themselves and their kindred. An impressive body
of traditions validated the powers of women elders. The witch's cultural
influence was strong enough to form a significant breakwater to the incoming
tide of patriarchy that automatically assigned all authority and all privilege
to the male, the warlord, the priest.
MacKenzie, Donald, Scottish Folk Lore and Folk Life, Blackie, London,
1935
O hOgain, Daithi, Myth, Legend, and Romance: An Encyclopedia of the Irish
Tradition, Prentice Hall, New York, 1991
Wood-Martin, W.G., Pagan Ireland: An Archaeological Sketch, Longmans,
Green & Co, London, 1895
_______. Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland: A Handbook of Irish Pre-Christian
Traditions, Vol II, London 1902
Ross, Anne, Pagan Celtic Britain, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1967
_______. "The Divine Hag of the Pagan Celts", in Venetia Newell,
ed., The Witch Figure: Essays in Honor of Katharine M. Briggs, Routledge
Kegan Paul, 1973
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